Batman movie “The Dark Knight” has been a box office behemoth with four straight weekends atop ticket sales charts, but some industry watchers expect the new comedy adventure “Tropic Thunder“ could knock it off its No. 1 perch this weekend.

“Tropic Thunder,” which stars Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey, Jr., opened in theaters on Wednesday with a healthy $6.5 million for the one night, slightly above expectations, said the DreamWorks movie studio which is behind the movie.
    
That was about half the $12.15 million first-day total of stoner comedy “Pineapple Express” last Wednesday, and ”Express” failed to beat ”Dark Knight” this past weekend when ticket sales were tallied. “Express” had $23 million for the weekend to $26 million for “Dark Knight.”

With a 44 percent drop – which is the average decline over the past few weeks for “Dark Knight” – it should have weekend ticket sales in the mid-teens, which is below the $20 million that DreamWorks expects from “Tropic Thunder” this weekend.
    
“Friday and Saturday I think are going to be big days for (”Tropic Thunder”), and it may have a shot at knocking out ‘Dark Knight’ from number one,” said Paul Dergarabedian, head of box office tracker Media By Numbers.
    
As of Wednesday, “The Dark Knight” had taken in nearly $452 million in the United States and Canada, according to the Web site for Box Office Mojo. It has ruled the box office every weekend since it opened on July 18. 

As an R-rated movie, “Tropic Thunder” has been difficult to advertise on TV because the most outrageous parts of the movie cannot be shown to all audiences. DreamWorks hopes the midweek opening can help overcome that difficulty.
    
“The great word of mouth from the Wednesday and Thursday opening will push people to see the movie this weekend,” said Chip Sullivan, a spokesman for DreamWorks.

Tom Cruise is no fan of psychiatry so he wasn’t too happy to get an unsolicited diagnosis from celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky — or so said his representative who compared the diagnosis to the “garbage” of the Nazis.

Pinsky, who hosts the nationally syndicated radio program “Loveline” and appears on cable TV on the VH1 reality show “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” was interviewed for the July issue of Playboy, and wondered aloud why Cruise was ”drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology.”

“To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood — maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect,” Pinsky said.

That did not please Cruise, and the actor’s lawyer, Bert Fields, told the New York Post that Pinsky sounded like a Nazi.  

“This unqualified television performer, who is obviously just looking for notoriety, is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them,” Fields told the Post. ”He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”

On Thursday, Pinsky’s publicist, Valerie Allen, said in a statement that the doctor ”apologizes if his comments were hurtful.”

She added that Pinsky, who among other jobs is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Keck University of Southern California School of Medicine, was not making a “blanket diagnosis” about Scientology or Cruise, the star of the movies “Mission: Impossible” and “Minority Report.”

Having a behind-the-scenes celebrity mom isn’t something Paris Hilton or her sister Nicky would know much about. Their mom, Kathy, seems to relish the  spotlight as much as her girls.

Having recently launched her own perfume and starred in a Web mini-series called “A Day With the Hiltons,” the 49-year-old Kathy Hilton has now nudged her way into Hollywood movies with a cameo appearance in Ben Stiller’s new summer comedy “Tropic Thunder,” playing Tom Cruise’s wife, according to In Touch Weekly.  

“She filmed last winter and didn’t even tell her kids because she wanted to surprise them,” a set insider told the celebrity magazine. “She raved about Tom,” said the insider. 

After filming “Tropic Thunder,” Kathy Hilton also shot a few episodes of daytime TV soap opera, “The Young and The Restless.” The older Hilton has been a sometime actress for years but not winning the same success as her girls. A reality TV show she hosted in 2005 called “I Want To Be A Hilton” flopped.

Who could forget it? Tom Cruise, jumping up on talk show queen Oprah Winfrey’s couch and proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes in 2005. Some thought Mr. Cool had lost his cool. Others thought it was a rare and tender display of human emotion from an A-list Hollywood celebrity whose personal life is shrouded in mystery.

Whatever the outcome, three years later Cruise is headed back to Winfrey’s couch. Cruise will be interviewed by Oprah on May 2 from his home in Telluride, Colorado. A statement from the “Oprah” show says he will discuss “his family, his life and the future.” Then, on Monday May 5, he is headed to Chicago and Oprah’s studio where he will tape a new show celebrating 25 years of his Hollywood films since his breakout role in “Risky Business.”

No doubt, millions of viewers will tune in to see if Cruise cooks up any wild displays of affection again. We’ll be watching, too. 

(Note: the picture above is not a photo of Cruise on Oprah’s couch but is a recreation Cruise jokingly displayed a few weeks later when he appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”)